In the terrible and regrettable violence over the past few months that killed a Democratic Minnesota House Speaker and her husband, and left a colleague and his family wounded, as well as the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, plus several school shootings, Americans are looking for answers. Some may believe we are too polarized to uncover the reasons why, with all sides pointing fingers at each other.  That may not be an accident.

In the wake of the tragedy at the Annunciation Catholic School, a few news outlets revealed a puzzling development, but not so unusual if you track this recent spate of radicalization, where people with little or no criminal record are suddenly turned into lethal killing machines.

“A CNN review of dozens of those pages – most written in Cyrillic letters to mask the disturbing content – raises questions about whether people in Westman’s life missed warning signs that could have prevented Westman from purchasing the array of firearms used in the killings,” wrote Casey Tolan and colleagues at CNN. “The journal entries provide a disturbing and extensive look at Westman’s private thoughts. The shooter described working to avoid detection, writing the entries in Cyrillic script as a “cypher” in case someone found the notebook.”

Why would someone in the U.S. have a death manifesto in Cyrillic, with Russian phrases?

The Alliance for Securing Democracy has documented over 600 authoritarian country penetrations of Western democracies. “When Interference Turns Kinetic” by Etienne Soula documents how these cyberattacks, long occurring in the United States and Europe, are shifting from online to a line of fire, with direct attacks. Germany alone has faced arson attacks, sabotage, bombs, and assassinations, a “shadow war” against the West, according to CSIS.

In America, it has turned from sowing disinformation on a grand scale to weaponizing it, influencing those enamored with far-right and anti-government groups, according to The Guardian. In Europe, they’ve needed agents to carry out these kinds of attacks because guns are hard to come by. In America, it’s easier for these foreign entities to fan the flames and let these lone wolves of any ideological persuasion take the next horrible step. All they need to do is give a push, and hide behind plausible deniability and weak content moderation, a similar hallmark of our free society that they seek to replace. Most of these extremist influences take the form of pro-Nazi rhetoric, pushing anti-Semitism and racist themes. Law enforcement has revealed that the Colorado high school shooter was “radicalized by extremist elements” like these, according to The Nebraska Examiner. Not all of these radicalized extremist elements are homegrown.

It’s going beyond Russian drones hitting NATO countries and piercing NATO airspace all last week. Instead of working with NATO to develop a counter-strategy, we’re shutting down or defanging the very agencies that could help us figure out what’s really going on.

Instead, influencers and politicians are calling on parents to pull kids out of colleges, blaming them for the violence. Colleges did not radicalize the Colorado H.S. shooter. There is no record of the Annunciation Catholic shooter attending a college. The accused assassin of the Minnesota politicians attended a Dallas Bible college in the 1990s. The accused killer of Charlie Kirk attended an electrician’s school. Students who came to Kirk’s Utah Valley University event were engaging in civil discourse, unlike the non-UVU student who fired the lethal shots.

We are finding ourselves back in a pre-9/11 mindset, where we ignore obvious threats and focus on scoring political points. Unless we honestly pursue the truth, it’s only going to get worse.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.  His views are his own.  He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu or on “X” at @johntures2. His first book “Branded” will be coming out this Fall, published by Huntsville Independent Press (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/). His author site is https://www.johntures.com/about-the-author/.